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When Raymond Lussier turns on his PlayStation this Friday, thousands of people will be watching. Hundreds will surround him. Some will cheer him on and others will heckle, hoping to see him fail. And countless more will sit at home in front of computer screens, following his every move.

Lussier, 22, is a Montreal-based professional video gamer and this weekend he will be participating in the 2011 Pro Circuit Championship in Providence, Rhode Island, playing Call of Duty: Black Ops.

For Lussier, taking the stage at a Major League Gaming (MLG) event is the payoff for hours of training and endless gaming in the weeks leading up to a competition.

“The atmosphere for any game on the main stage is the dream of any professional athlete,” he says. “Hockey players dream to play in the big arenas with the top players in the world. For gamers, that dream is the MLG main stage.”

Lussier made his debut on the MLG circuit at a competition in Anaheim, California in November 2009 and has seen fan culture explode since then.

“At the Anaheim event this year, there must have been a few thousand fans sitting in front of the huge Starcraft 2 main stage watching the players battle it out,” he says. “Any time something happened, the crowd would go crazy, giving anyone in the surrounding [area] goose bumps.”

This season has been MLG’s biggest to date. Founded in 2002, MLG engrained itself in the gaming community as video games made the crossover from niche hobby to massive industry. The competition in Rhode Island will be the culmination of a six-city tour that started in Dallas, Texas on April 1.

In a previous competition in Orlando, the live streaming broadcast shattered prior records for the most unique concurrent online viewers: 181,000 fans tuned in to see the best gamers in North America battle it out.

Expectations are high for Providence. Adam Apicella, Senior Vice President of league operations at MLG, is hoping Providence will break another record: “181,000 peak concurrents is huge for us and puts us on par with traditional [television] viewing numbers… we’re hoping to continue our record breaking season.”

MLG has tested out cable TV deals with the USA network and G4 in the past but Apicella says online streaming is a better fit. “What we found at the time was our audience wasn’t there,” he says. “We turned to online and streaming because our audience responded well and we can secure the real-estate we need to broadcast a competition for 3 days straight.”

The league is also cashing in on the popularity of Starcraft 2, which, since its release in July 2010, has become a global phenomenon.

The epicentre of Starcraft is South Korea. There, gaming is the unofficial national hobby and pro gamers are celebrities. This season MLG found a way to bring some of that buzz to America, and entered into an exchange program with the GOMTV Global Starcraft II League in Korea to fly Starcraft 2 players to the U.S. to compete.

Lussier has seen the effect of Starcraft 2 on MLG. “Most of [the growth] in the past year is due to Starcraft 2,” he said. “Their community is incredibly huge and with the addition of the best Koreans coming to compete—it made the MLG Starcraft 2 scene explode.”

He expects interest in MLG and e-sports to continue to snowball. “E-sports are constantly growing, with more competitors trying their luck to become the best and more fans coming to support their favorite players at events like MLG,” Lussier said.

Lussier and many other e-sports advocates believe pro gaming has the potential to make the crossover into mainstream popular culture, just as video games have. “Almost everyone owns a video game console now,” he said. “Anyone who loves competition and people battling out on their favorite video game title could become interested in e-sports and join the growth of it.”

MLG Providence kicks off on Friday, November 18 and runs through Sunday November 20. The live broadcast can be viewed on the MLG website.

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